Earlier today, the Obama Administration rescinded most of a Bush-era “conscience clause” regulation that gave special legal rights to health workers who refuse to provide care they find objectionable on personal or religious grounds. Under the Bush rule, hospitals, health plans, and clinics would lose federal funding unless they allowed doctors and other employees to refuse to provide medical care that violated their personal, moral, or religious beliefs. As reported in the Washington Post:

The Health and Human Services Department eliminated nearly the entire rule put into effect by the administration of President George W. Bush during his final days in office that was widely interpreted as allowing such workers to opt out of a broad range of medical services, such as providing the emergency contraceptive Plan B, treating gay men and lesbians and prescribing birth control to single women. …

The rule was sought by conservative groups, which argued that workers were increasingly being fired, disciplined or penalized in other ways for trying to exercise their “right of conscience.”

Women’s health advocates, family-planning proponents, abortion rights activists and others had condemned the regulation, saying it created a major obstacle to providing many health services, including abortion, access to the emergency contraception Plan B, birth control pills and other forms of family planning, as well as infertility treatment and possibly a wide range of scientific research. Advocates for end-of-life care also said it could enable doctors, nurses and others to refuse to honor patients’ wishes.

Hospitals and other healthcare providers should not be denied the freedom to put the needs of their patients first. If a woman who has been raped needs emergency contraception, a hospital should have the right to actually require its employees to provide that essential care, regardless of their personal beliefs. When a patient needs medical help in an emergency, she shouldn’t have to keep her fingers crossed that she happens to get a doctor whose religious beliefs don’t clash with hers. When a family has to make an agonizing end of life decision, they should be able to do what’s best for their loved one, not what’s best for a complete stranger. Medical organizations should be able to hold themselves out as reliable providers of the services they offer.

Under the Bush rule, such entities were forced to run their operations in a way that put people’s health – especially women’s health – at severe risk, just to please the religious right.

It is important to note that the Obama Administration’s move comes on the same day that the House of Representatives voted to deny all federal funding to Planned Parenthood clinics.

The religious right’s war against women’s rights goes on.